Tom made his way through the fog. It wasn"t real fog – at least, it hadn"t been in recent years – but the cloying atmosphere in Stephan"s office had never truly cleared after the ban. Prior to smoking being prohibited, you literally had to part the colloidal-imbued air to see your way to a chair. Now there was greater transparency, but no matter how often or how well the office was cleaned or decorated, it still felt the same. The smell of stale nicotine and whisky was immoveable and whether real or imagined, the smoke was still there.
A career journalist, Stephan Presley fulfilled every cliché associated with the industry. Now aged fifty, he frequently drank to excess and he"d been smoking sixty a day for over thirty-five years. More than three quarters of a million cigarettes in aggrega
